Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

If there is one thing this past year has taught me, it's that wide swaths of the left consider misogyny to be a "little" hatred, and feel no obligation to name it when either our enemies or our comrades practice it.

It is exhausting and tragic.

https://twitter.com/GothBotAlice/status/1295024631343206400

We are experiencing a wave of incredibly explicit misogyny in our culture and especially online culture right now.

It's partially Trump-given permission, partially the mainstreaming of gamergate tactics, and partially a backlash against #metoo wins.

As many antifascists have pointed out, one of the defining differences between older school Stormfronters and the younger alt-right and Terrorgram Nazi crowd is that the newer guys are deeply influenced by incels and Gamergate & invested in an explicitly violent hatred of women.

The dirtbag "left" crowd has also adopted Gamergate misogyny, language, and brigading of women, and is actively in the process of assimilating violently misogynist incels into their online culture.

The broader left claims opposition to misogyny, but it gets practiced rarely and selectively.

Intra-left misogynist attacks on women are often treated as "drama" that women are complicit in, and ignored or treated as a joke.

Antifascists are better than most, but still guilty.

Even antifascists very often treat misogyny as a "little" hatred, even though we are constantly confronted with just how endemic murderously misogynistic rhetoric and domestic violence against women is to far right movement.

It's a failure of our own intersectional analysis.

We slip into thinking of the misogyny and the racism as things that can be separated and taxonomized into individual hatreds, as opposed to understanding them as part of an ugly organic whole in which they compound each other.

That's an outdated mode of understanding hate that elides the way those hatreds play out on the real world, the way they co-constitute and feed off each other, the way they take turns exacerbating each other.

There are no "small" hatreds.

Violence against women can be easy to ignore, because it often occurs behind closed doors.

That makes it easier to see misogyny on here and say "sticks and stones" instead of understanding it as reinforcing and feeding a deadly, widespread, and deep hatred.

That's a hatred that ends up disproportionately wielded and used to harm and murder women and femmes who live at the intersection of woman/femme and other oppressed identity.

Hateful violence compounds at the intersections of oppression, and treating one of the intersecting streets as negligible or nonexistent makes it functionally impossible to understand why and how the car crashes happening at that site are so deadly and also how to prevent them.

Treating misogyny as a "little" hatred both ignores the violent realities of that hate and makes it harder to identify and understand the way it relates to and contextualizes other hatreds.

Explicit misogyny is the angle the far right is using-- has already used-- to launder its ideas into left space.

It starts out as transparent misogyny, gets used to introduce coded racism, and then once it's established, the racism becomes more and more overt, too.

If we don't get better about having zero tolerance for the misogyny, they'll keep using it as a vehicle to gain entry to left online space and introduce the "bigger" hatreds more and more explicitly after gaining a foothold.

These hatreds keep close company, almost always.

There are no "little" hatreds.

Hatreds feed off each other and help introduce each other into new spaces.

They co-constitute, and the people who live at their intersections get run over twice as often.

You can't practice effective antiracism unless explicitly countering misogyny is part of your practice, too.

You don't get to cherrypick and call yourself antifascist or a part of liberatory movement.

The end.